Ratings out of five

[albummaster]

Just toying with the idea of changing the rating scale to conform to other sites. At the moment, we have a 20 point sliding scale from 0 to 100:

0 , 5, 10 ... 80, 85, 90, 95, 100 (steps of 5)

Now thinking of changing it to a 20 point sliding scale from 0 to 5:

0, ¼, ½ .... 4, 4¼, 4½, 4¾, 5 (steps of ¼)

(i.e. show ratings out of 5 instead of 100),

The main reasons behind thinking this are to make the ratings on BEA easier to compare against other websites and to make the ratings simpler for new users to understand (people are used to seeing ratings out of five on other websites and the system here is quite unusual).

All existing ratings could be converted without any loss of accuracy as the granularity of both scales is the same.

Thoughts?

[19loveless91]

I see what you're trying to do, but I actually really like this scale compared to the one that for example RYM has (sth to do with me not liking the decimals), so I wouldn't change it...

[Wombi]

I with loveless on this one.

[Kiki]

Please don't change

[GARY]

I like it fine just the way it is
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[Bork]

Don't matter to me, and there sort of is both already as there are only five stars on the scale thing.

[RFNAPLES]

Most people don't take change very well.
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[GARY]

[albummaster]

OK, thanks for feedback. A bit surprised by the unanimous reaction, but I suppose it's a good thing that people seem to like things like they are. However, I'm still slightly uneasy about the way ratings are working at the moment. We show five stars, but the actual grade is a percentile. It doesn't make a lot of sense really.

When you want to compare across websites, it's not straight forward to compare ratings for the same album side by side.

Arcade Fire - Funeral:

Amazon - 4.3 / 5
AllMusic - 5 / 5
BEA - 88 / 100
Metacritic - 90 / 100
RYM - 4.12 / 5

You have to do some mental arithmetic to work out 88/100 is really 4.4 / 5, but is that good or bad? It's difficult for people to make the call about whether something has a 'good' rating or not.

Maybe, if this is a non-starter, keep ratings out of 100 but perhaps show next to the rating whether this is a high/average/low rating or not vis-a-vis other items of the same type (album, song, chart etc).

It's easy to ignore ratings if you don't know how to interpret them and I think this is happening a little bit at the moment. I'd like to see some indicator to tell me that is a good rating (above the norm), so that albums with high ratings stand out more. Not sure what that looks like yet though.

[alelsupreme]

Not that difficult, i'm guessing most people have at the very least a basic understanding of maths.